


Blood Stains

by followsrabbit



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 11:00:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5454233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/followsrabbit/pseuds/followsrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Blood Sharing: A ritual in which a vampire shares blood with his mate to symbolize their union.”  Crickets chirp and traffic bristles outside the open window.  “Or something.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Stains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, mific! I hope this is okay :)

Blood stains (literally), blood taints (figuratively), and blood binds (literally and figuratively).

So Baz should have expected this. So, wiping an apple’s juice from his lips and leaning against the kitchen counter, Baz pretends he did. No gasping, no flinching; no cringe or shiver or flight.  Allowing his eyelids to droop, Baz just stares through his lashes.

“It’s fascinating,” Bunce continues, words as frazzling as her hair.  “To create that kind of connection-”

“Fascinating. Grotesque. Fucking psychotic.” Baz bounces his apple in his palm, like he hasn’t a care in the world beyond its core, like the shards in his voice are made of crystallized boredom, rather than icy horror. “Tell me, were you one of those children who enjoyed dosing frogs in cleaning detergent, or is yours a recent derangement?”

It was always so simple to get a reaction from Simon.  A few sneered words, an unexplained giggle, and Snow was ready to split knuckles and spit magic. Craned over the wooden tabletop with a puddle of pages surrounding her, Bunce barely acknowledges his glare.  “You were looking into binding rituals.  Well. Here’s a binding ritual special made for you.”  She crosses her arms into a plump, wool-clad pretzel.  “You can hardly blame me if it offends your terribly traditional sensibilities.”

Baz drawls a sigh down into the seat across from her.  “Binding rituals like my mother found.  Wedding rituals. Not…” he gropes for words, finds only, “vampire kinks.”

Penelope leans over to pat him on the shoulder, ignoring his hard flinch.  “Simon agreed to marry you.  Proposed to you, actually.  He knows you have fangs, Pitch, and – as best woman to the both of you – it’s my responsibility to make sure you do too.”

Baz’s fingernails scrape a screech into the tabletop.  “I know what my mouth looks like, Bunce.”  What his mouth feels like when he gets hungry or restless.  What his meals look like.  What his teeth look like after he sates his hunger.  “And I don’t recall asking you to my best anything.”

A shrug, quicker and sharper than Snow’s trademark.  “It was implied.”

“Implied by what?” he asks between a crunch of his apple and a cringe away from her palm; it’s the easier topic to pursue at present.

Bunce’s remarkably thick eyebrows crease towards her remarkably thicker bangs.  “The sheer amount of times that I’ve endured walking in on the two of you groping one another.” 

Which is fair point – it was bad enough before she moved in with Micah, still common enough now -- but nevertheless:  “I’m not going to feed my blood to Simon.”

Penelope purses her lips, and drops her largest book into his satchel (leather; Italian; the latest installment of ‘are you certain you really wish to continue with this homosexual marriage plot’ gifts from his father). (Plot. As though he’s still a second year scheming about chimeras and petty revenges.)  “Your binding rituals, your choice.”

Baz points a nod, forgets his father and his fangs.  Bloody right it is.

"Anyone home?” Simon’s voice reaches into the kitchen from the living room, and Baz hopes to Crowley his fiancée never learns a word about fucking archaic vampire wedding rites. 

* * *

 The things is – Simon doesn’t mean to spy. 

Spying has never suited him. Back in his Watford days, his magic days, he was always better at charging in and going off and exploding into general havoc, than tiptoeing through covert missions.  (His covert missions never stayed very covert.)   

It's just that, for once, he manages to walk into the apartment without slamming his wings into every which wall, and he's thinking about taking advantage of the rare stealth to surprise his boyfriend, when he hears hissed banter from the other room.

The thing is – Simon _does_ mean to linger outside the kitchen.  To listen to whatever fight Baz and Penelope are having about whatever binding rituals their wedding might entail.  There are only so many options, now that he's Normal.  Magic-less.  Limited.  (Baz and Penny both claim 'limited' is a good thing. Things without limits tend to explode.)

The thing is – when he filches the worn leather book from Baz’s bag later, he means that too.

*

“Blood Sharing: A ritual in which a vampire shares blood with his mate to symbolize their union.”  Crickets chirp and traffic bristles outside the open window. “Or something.”

Underneath the thick duvet, Baz goes still at the quiet blear of Simon’s voice in the dark. Statue still, ice still, I’m-planning-to-strangle-my-boyfriend's-best-mate-still. And maybe Simon should have waited until morning to bring this up.  Maybe he should have waited until breakfast when he could hide behind scones and butter and looming workdays, but he hasn’t been able to shake the quote from his head all night.  If he were still the Mage’s Heir, he could probably have turned it into a spell of some sort by now, by brute force of obsession.

Simon tucks his cheek into his wing, and chances a look at Baz through the pitch black. His eyes have adjusted just enough to make out his boyfriend’s thin lips opening and closing and pausing around the words, “You stole Penny’s book.”

“It’s in my apartment. I don’t think I can technically steal something from my own apartment.”

“And I don’t think I need to worry about an Anathema anymore.”

Simon shrugs away the natural segue into questions of biting and bloodsharing – not because he thinks Baz would really hurt him, but because he worries Baz might leave.

Tangling their fingers together underneath the covers, Simon soothes the stiffness from Baz’s pale knuckles, and pulses their grips.

He never wants Baz to leave.

“Agatha used to watch some vampire soap where they did that, I think,” Simon whispers into the moonlight peaking through the blinds.  “Probably fantasizing about you through it."

Baz’s voice is all spiked syllables. “Beautiful memory. Let’s never discuss your former lady love in bed again.”

“Right. So bloodsharing—“

“Just how is Wellbelove’s dog doing?  Still alive and yapping and psychologically scarred from Bunce’s possession stint?”

Simon swats him with his tail, mostly to shut him up, and partly because it goes sore when he lies on it too long.

Baz rubs Simon’s red scales against his thigh, and swallows a grunt.  “I can’t decide what’s more disturbing – that book, or the fact that you and Bunce are both so keen on discussing it.”  His lips sink against the mole by Simon’s ear.  “You do realize a normal boyfriend would have run screaming by now. Whatever daydreams Wellbelove might have fostered, she would have been out the door and at the nearest airport hours ago.”

“A normal boyfriend wouldn’t have wings and a tail.”  Simon’s shrug rustles the sheets before meeting the hard edge of Baz’s chin.  “And I’m not Agatha.”

“Thank Crowley.”

Resting there, with Baz’s cheekbone flat on Simon’s neck, neither says a word.  Simon isn’t sure he has words. Drinking blood is – well. It doesn’t matter how much of it he buys for Baz from the butcher, how many ounces they keep in the fridge, how often he sees Baz sneaking sips of bright red from his London School of Economics mug, it’s still strange.

The end of Simon’s tail itches.

But then, he’s always had a monopoly on strange, hasn’t he.

Simon licks a stammer onto his lips.  “It doesn’t look… bad.  In Agatha’s shows. Sometimes.”

He doesn’t need to see in the dark to know that Baz has just arched an eyebrow, but their faces are close enough that he can.  “Do I look like a creation of American television to you, Snow?”

A squint. A shrug.  “You’re pretty enough.”

Baz rolls his eyes and a hand through Simon’s hair.  “And far too vain to be swayed by cheap flattery.”

Tilting his temple into his fiancée’s palm, Simon considers that.  Counters by clenching his fingers into Baz’s shirt, and pulling him on top of him.  Arching up from the mattress, he drags Baz’s lower lip between his teeth, kisses it. Kisses him.

Baz groans into his mouth, and tightens his grip on Simon’s dark bronze curls, crushing and unspooling them between his palm-lines.  Knees knocking together, hips grounding together, it’s easy to forget musty pages and tensed shoulder blades.  (Simon shifts his hands beneath Baz’s shirt, and strokes the knots strewn across his back for good measure.)  (Baz murmurs _Simon_ and lifts the hem straight over his head for better measure.)

 *

They don’t share blood that night.

 *

They don’t share blood the next night either.

* 

But, when they do—

 “Are you sure?”

Simon lowers his mouth to the sliver of red darkening Baz’s wrist in answer, swiping his tongue across the blood painting his veins before it can stain the sheets.  He can feel the stiffness in Baz’s arm, in Baz’s spine, in Baz’s stare. Can near taste it.

(Strange to taste it.)

He thinks Baz might try to mutter something else, but then his breath hitches, and a growl scratches Simon’s throat, and everything is too warm to hear through.

Too much like mulled wine, if mulled wine were magic.  Like swimming, if water were made of thoughts.  Because Baz is everywhere, in his mouth and his head.  Because he wants him to be everywhere else.  Because—

_So much better than American television._


End file.
